Happiness

I was 6, in a sleepier part of Bangalore – Malleshwaram. My father never bought me a single toy to play with. I presume it was his insensitivity to what I would like as a child. But, I had a few things that kept me occupied through the day – a piece of hacksaw blade, a piece of wood, magnets, a battery, wires and a small bulb (maybe my father’s ex-scooter’s indicator lamp). I could do ‘amazing’ things with it. Carve out the wood, light the bulb with the battery, open up the battery and get excited seeing the graphite rod inside it.

We were just about 7 boys in a Christian girls school in Gulbarga when I was in my first grade. Gulbarga has almost nothing to offer to compensate the Energy-Overdose-Syndrome (EOS) I was suffering from. We had a huge school campus – with large open fields to play, cages with foxes and birds, large areas covered with tall grass, large canopied areas etc. I had nothing to do while I was there in that town – apart from winning local marble tournaments with a close friend and visiting the science centre every weekend. I would create imaginary espionage assignments for my 6 other friends and we would sneak into school and reach arbitrary targets – wade through slush and the tall grass, miss imaginary bullets whizzing past our ears and rescue bullet hit friends.

I would create a ‘tree house’ on a huge mango tree in my backyard. That would be my summer assignment – a nice cosy place with pillows, back rests for reading my continuous supply of Archie comics. And I would get this wonderfully delicious thing (a whitish powdery sweet cube) to eat from a shop for 25 paisa – and lots of it. Or making the “cork ball” from the resin from the seeds of a tree, the canopy under which we spent many days during summer vacation – grinding the seeds, rolling the gum into a ball, heating it and dropping it into cold water to harden it, and tempering it by oiling it and drying it in the sun. The ball would invariably break in two days after a five day effort. We would tell one another that we are getting better at making the ultimate cork ball.

We would sit together after a well ‘fought’ cricket match in a roadside drain (the drains used to be very very clean in Bangalore before) every evening. We (guys from the street behind mine) never spoke about studies or school, but there used to be so much to talk about. Occasionally there used to be these girls going in their bicycles (in pink). They were taller than us, but I loved to see them nevertheless. They would look at us and smile too (even if were dirty and brown, with sweat pouring from our foreheads after the game). Between 1900 hours and 1930 hours we would watch an artificial satellite move in the sky and call it the night.

Did I love that part of my life? Every bit of it. Is it just a retrospective bias? Not at all, I loved those moments while they happened. The happiness was genuine and unrelated to anything else. The biggest mystery is to uncover how we derived happiness out of petty things and replicate them now. How difficult is that?

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Tagged: cork, cricket, happiness

Posted in: On my mind, Personal